Featured Artist Maria Aparici

Expressionist artist Maria Aparici creates powerful, emotional images of people and animals. To see more of her paintings, please visit her website.

“Artistas” Oil on Canvas, Each 40cm x 40cm

I try to paint every day, it is what I most enjoy doing. The female figure represents the fundamental basis of my work. My idea is to project my observations of women’s behavior, around men and towards each other, in my paintings. Women feature everywhere; in my self-portraits, portraits, abstract and expressionist works. I interpret them in my own private way, and project the distorted images of them that my brain assembles on to the canvas.

“Wanted Dead” Oil on Canvas, 146cm x 114cm

I also paint animals, enhancing the magnitude of their beauty and intelligence against the cruelty of mankind. It often happens that men are more barbaric than most animals, particularly in places like Spain, where our pathetic irreverence results in bulls being hugely mistreated.

“Refugiados” Oil on Canvas, 146cm x 114cm

My work is packed with emotion. Each day, my internal state of mind changes, constantly affecting the compositions I create. My brain sends varying images to the eye at any given moment in time, which is why I believe that whoever contemplates my work has to respond with all five senses to the unique emotions I may have transmitted that day. In my work, as in life, accidents don’t tend to repeat themselves. I wander between the figurative and abstract impressions of the world I see through my eyes. I am a product of the decisions I make on a daily basis and am simply unable to copy my own work. My fluctuating state is what drives my painting. This means that no two creations of mine are ever the same.

“Friends” Oil on Canvas, 146cm x 114cm

My women are typically amusing caricatures of the absurd, interior ugliness and violence that most of us endure. They often emanate a comical reflection of women as a “divine creation.” The magic of expressionism consists of maintaining the equilibrium between the grotesque and the caricaturistic, without crossing boundaries. My expressionism also portrays a more personal feminine view.

“Refugees” Oil on Canvas, 146cm x 114cm

I want to express my sadness, rage and happiness by creating and destroying art. Painting is a form of therapy where my emotional state, passions or frustrations are captured in the canvas with aggressive brushstrokes – impulsive and womanly sketches that the brush creates in violent discomfort. This is a view of a more personal, feminine and emotional state.

“Brexit” Oil on Canvas, Each 40cm x 40cm

The essence of art is to transmit emotion and communicate feelings. Do not forget that art is the product of imaginative, unconventional and sometimes suffering minds. For me, both art and design require a process that involves suffering, and I believe in both instances good work is created with harmony, originality, madness or even chaos – just on different surfaces.

“Cameron” Oil on Canvas, 170cm x 65cm

The world exists in a state of perpetual chaos. We make decisions instinctively, and then work to create infrastructures around these decisions in order to justify them which we then refer to as “common sense.” Painting was my instinctive decision, and, as life itself, it is full of achievements and disappointments that my common sense accepts. Let us see what history, which is primarily a collection of the memories of survivors who are generally neither victorious nor defeated, have to say about me and my common sense. I believe art should bandage the distance between the artist and the observer in the hope that the image will remain in their memory forever. I am working on it.

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